Holy COW this is cool, or at least, looks it. A California-based company called WayTools has developed the TextBlade, a diminutive, minimalist keyboard that nevertheless provides the same key spacing (19mm on center) as...

If you hear voices in your head, that's bad. If you hear piano music in your head, that's not so bad, particularly if you're a professional pianist. Yet Gergely Bogányi still found it disturbing, because the...

In my high school days, the threat of moving earth for a living was meant to keep us in line. "If you don't hit the books, you'll be digging ditches," the teachers warned.Digging ditches might suck, but what they didn't...

There's a reason "The Walking Dead" is set in the South; because watching a bunch of us Yankees trying to load 9mm rounds into a .45 or accidentally ejecting the magazine every time we try to turn the safety off would...

No, it ain't real, but we'd love to see it if it were. German website CURVED/labs worked up this concept design for an anniversary edition of the original Macintosh, echoing that machine's shape while flaunting the...

Italian design engineer Guido Medana has invented eyeglasses with a new type of hinge called Spine. Created through metal injection molding (although the website, perhaps erroneously, lists the definition of MIM as...

In his 20s, Michael Walker worked as a jewelrymaker. But one day his wife gave him a copy of American Blade, a magazine for knife collectors. Walker looked through the pages and figured he'd give knifemaking a try.That...

How do we fathom fathoms? Often by referring back to our own bodies. It's startling to realize that the much beloved metric system and the idiosyncratic imperial only became widely adopted in the 20th century. Human...

As makers know, humans tend to be more engaged with objects they had a hand in building. DIY'ers are proud of their coffee tables, furniture designers get a special enjoyment out of sitting in a chair that they produced...

Apparently, everyone's favorite familial relationship testing board-game Monopoly was first conceived in 1903 as an educational tool by American Elizabeth Magie— the game-play intended to illustrate the negative...

LaCie's got a long history of tapping designers and design brands to create memory devices that needn't be hidden behind your monitor. (See Sam Hecht, Neil Poulton and Christofle, to name a few.) Now they've turned to...

There's sometimes an uncomfortable paradox in the condition of the industrial designer—whilst making a living with the imagineering of consumable products, we're also often amongst the most aware and troubled by...

In and around New Year's holidays the Japanese public traditionally make their way through vast quantities of Mochi—sticky and sweet cakes of pounded rice, eaten usually in soup, or toasted and served with sweet...

As an avid documenter, collector and all around object enthusiast, my accumulation of 'stuff' from design school and beyond would rival designers much older than myself. In notebooks alone I have managed to fill many a...

The Apple Watch launches this year, which means we'll soon see loads of imitators and competitors. The 2015 CES is bound to be smartwatch-crazy. But one prominent watch manufacturer is taking a different tack: Offering...

Plastic is convenient to produce, though not the most durable stuff in the world. To get around this, San-Francisco-based industrial designer Mark Kelley created a line of desktop organizers made from...

Dumb Drum is the name of a group of amateur filmmakers in California. For years they've been making shot-for-shot "sweded"* versions of popular movie trailers--remember fellow filmmaker Dustin McLean doing this with...

Despite the Russian-sounding name, Laika is an American stop-motion animation company based in Oregon. You probably know their name from 2009's Coraline, which they produced, and earlier this year they released The...

Following their recent three-year $90-million mega-renovation, the Cooper-Hewitt has been going all out to raise the game of their recently relaunched all important museum SHOP. As part of their efforts, curator Chad...

Purveyors of web-based procrastination-enablers Adult Swim have been treating online audiences to a series of ingenious infomercial parodies in recent months—from feature-creeping Broomshakalaka to the frankly...

Last-minute shoppers: So you've mastered the one-piece-of-tape gift wrapping method, which works great with rectilinear objects. But now you've got to wrap an irregularly-shaped object, since that potted cactus was too...

The holiday season is when we start seeing some wacky promotional products, and this first one's a cake-taker. Johnnie Walker partnered up with shoemaking outfit Oliver Sweeney to produce these Leather Brogues. And yes,...

This post includes photos and an excerpt from the photoessay Christmas, Handmade in China originally published by Make Works. Make Works is an organization based in Scotland championing local manufacturing by making it...

With all of the hullabaloo over the new lightsaber design, fans may have missed another important detail in the trailer for the new Star Wars movie. First off, most of us know the Millenium Falcon has a round radar...

Owners of the Knee Defender may be able to purchase a companion device next year, albeit one from a different company. Said company, Soaragami, is a start-up looking to tackle "the problem of fighting for armrests" with...

It's a sad fact, but true, that most of us industrial designers know the feeling of working on something that we don't care about. I myself have worked on many projects that I felt were inferior or even unneccessary,...

In only the most recent food fad to hit the streets of London and national headlines, bearded twin brothers Gary and Alan Keery reportedly had the epiphany to open up a cereal cafe one hungover morning whilst craving a...

I have to be honest—I wasn't going to say anything to you, but now I feel I must. It's not that your gift-giving skills are bad—I know that you've faithfully perused both our 2014 Gift Guide and the...

I just spotted these two unusual objects from Levenger, a Florida-based company that designs and sells their own desktop items for folks who still use actual paper. The first is this nifty, dimunitive single-sheet paper...